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Kuala Lumpur Airport is Discouraging

So, I’m writing this from Kuala Lumpur airport, at the street food counter, but this won’t come up until I get to Ireland, because I have no WiFi and am afraid to turn on my phone for the data in case I accidentally owing the soul of my firstborn.

The flight from Melbourne was pretty great. I was seated next to two guys who were talking in … not actually sure. At first I thought Dutch, but then that didn’t seem quite right, so perhaps Danish? Finnish? Swedish? I’m really bad at my Germanics, apparently. One of them moved to the row in front, for the extra room, and his friend very graciously told me I could use the footwell under his friend’s seat for my bag and was free to borrow the extra pillow if I should need it. I didn’t work up the courage to have an actual conversation with him, but we did the “you weren’t a total pain in the hindquarters to sit next to for eight hours” nod disembarking.

I’m not sure what the substance was that they served us on the plane. They told me it was fish. It … looked like fish. It had, however, neither the taste nor the texture of fish. But hey, it was food.

Then, I arrived at the Kuala Lumpur airport, and the world imploded.

After figuring out by trial and error, some airplane signs and following the crowd that I needed to take the Aerotrain (helpfully translated from Malaysian to English as ‘Aerotrain’), I arrived in the C gates section.

Awesome, I thought. This is exactly where I need to be. My gate is C2.

I walked in the direction indicated.

That direction was for gates C1, C3, C5 and then C7-26.

Also, it turns out, the Departures board down that end assumes you know you’re in roughly the right spot, because my flight was not listed on it.

As the dog on the Internet says, I have no idea what I’m doing.

I wandered around the terminal for about fifteen minutes, while the Information Booth receptionists watched me and tried to figure out whether or not I was significantly lost and whether serious intervention was required.

Upon finding the gate, I decided to explore the Duty Free and Cafés section. This was good, including finding the best use of three umlauts in a row I’ve ever seen (though I may have been willing to laugh at anything by that point).

Apologies for blurriness …

I decided to eat at the street food shop for two reasons, one, because I’m not leaving the airport, so this might be my only chance to eat some Malaysian food before I leave, and two because it had powerpoints, and my laptop died on the flight over.

This is the part where I learned that there is no look quite so judging as the one a counter person gives the young, frazzled foreigner who picks something off the menu at random and then has to ask if they have “like, iced tea or something”.

You have no idea how badly I needed there to be a cup of tea available.

You also have no idea how confusing the substance in the glass was to my brain. It does not taste like black tea. It might taste closer to coffee, except that it tastes nothing like coffee whatsoever. It tastes slightly less unlike coffee than it tastes unlike black tea. It might taste like a Bubble Tea, except Bubble Tea doesn’t actively defy tastebuds. It’s not unpleasant – I wouldn’t buy another, but I certainly don’t regret buying this one. It’s just not doing anything to settle my nerves, is all.

Alright, I’m shutting down the laptop so it charges a little faster, and trying to figure out what went wrong with my e-reader. I also need to shut the laptop down because, due to lack of Internet connection, it has not updated its clock, and is telling me I’ve missed my flight by two hours. Which is so not helping.

Update: On the plane to Amsterdam

Also, so very glad I decided to get to the gate ½ an hour early – I managed to get there when FINAL BOARDING was flashing on the screen, with a 15-minute line to get through the scanners and board (I didn’t even know I’d have to go through the scanners to get into the gate lounge!). Upon getting into the gate lounge, there were no lines moving in and no boarding announcements until 10 minutes after that, so I spent ten minutes in the gate lounge convinced I’d done something awfully wrong.